Feminism without tears

Abstract

PLURALISTS 'DANCE'; THEORISTS 'STORM' OR 'MARCH,' WRITES NINA Baym in her 1984 essay The Madwoman and Her Languages: Why I Don't Do Feminist Literary Theory. Setting the pragmatism and diversity of American academic feminism in the 1970s in opposition to the Francocentric, legalistic, and increasingly misogynist work of feminist theorists in the 1980s, the article and its provocation are characteristic of Baym's witty, no nonsense, and avowedly liberal feminist approach to American literature and culture in Feminism and American Literary History. In this collection of previously published essays, which range from her influential 1981 essay Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors to more recent work on women's historical writings, Baym locates herself at the very center of past and ongoing debates about the very meanings we bring to such terms as feminism, American, literary, and history. At the time Baym began teaching and writing within the institutional spaces of the American academy in the mid-1960s, literary study meant the close reading of a selection of white male canonical texts as a source of universal meaning and self-evident aesthetic value. It was in this context that Adrienne Rich, at a 1971 session of the Modem Language Association, issued her now famous call for a revisionary feminist criticism: